Written Expression and Autism

Robert Pennington Author

03/16/2021 Added

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[00:00:04.440]Hi, and welcome.
[00:00:05.273]My name's Rob Pennington.
[00:00:06.460]I'm a Professor of Special Education
[00:00:08.230]at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
[00:00:09.820]I'm so excited to be here today to talk to you about
[00:00:12.480]written expression for learners
[00:00:13.770]with extensive support needs.
[00:00:15.160]And we're talking about those students
[00:00:16.410]with intellectual disabilities, autism,
[00:00:18.700]usually have complex communication needs.
[00:00:20.470]Often these kids are on alternate assessments.
[00:00:23.090]This is a real passion of mine.
[00:00:24.650]I started in special education as a peer tutor,
[00:00:28.670]working supporting some students in my school
[00:00:31.683]when I was in elementary school.
[00:00:33.450]And then I decided that in high school,
[00:00:37.040]I wanted to be a teacher.
[00:00:37.873]My dad was a teacher.
[00:00:39.180]Of course, he quit teaching later and as a good son,
[00:00:41.340]I rebelled against him.
[00:00:42.410]I was like, I'm gonna teach anyway. (chuckles)
[00:00:44.630]And then I started working in a middle school setting.
[00:00:48.530]And what I realized as well,
[00:00:50.070]my students had a lot of very strong literacy skills
[00:00:54.010]but they weren't receiving program to kind of further those.
[00:00:56.830]So I was really interested in teaching
[00:01:00.370]some early academics alongside
[00:01:02.330]with good old adaptive skills
[00:01:03.990]and those kinds of critical life skills to my students.
[00:01:07.110]And that kind of fermented my interest in this area.
[00:01:10.370]I was asked to, at one point
[00:01:12.440]after teaching for several years,
[00:01:13.970]I was asked to support a group of students with autism
[00:01:18.370]that were in full inclusive settings
[00:01:20.980]but they had limited skill repertoires
[00:01:22.900]or smaller skill repertoires.
[00:01:24.700]And so my job was to work
[00:01:26.260]with the special education teacher,
[00:01:28.180]the general education teacher in kind of itinerant fashion
[00:01:31.690]to help them improve programming for these students.
[00:01:35.550]And what I noticed during that time was that
[00:01:38.050]a lot of the general education teachers
[00:01:40.500]were really confounded
[00:01:41.590]by the fact that my students had poor communication skills
[00:01:45.750]and they also did not have any writing skills.
[00:01:49.150]And a general education teacher
[00:01:51.040]often assigns the group tasks.
[00:01:53.520]They have to write their responses to show what they know
[00:01:56.740]and our students can participate that way.
[00:01:58.480]So immediately, I dove into finding alternative ways
[00:02:01.810]for students to demonstrate what they know
[00:02:04.150]and to modify kind of writing tasks.
[00:02:07.280]And then as I entered my doctoral program,
[00:02:12.300]this was an area of interest of mine.
[00:02:14.230]And as we started doing some early studies
[00:02:16.050]and I've kind of continued to pursue this line
[00:02:19.210]since I graduated in 2010.
[00:02:20.950]So I'm excited to share with you some things that I know
[00:02:23.810]from the research from other people's research today
[00:02:26.640]and then share with you some of the work
[00:02:28.730]that I've done with my colleagues.
[00:02:31.510]So I want to kind of start today
[00:02:33.240]by making sure that we understand
[00:02:36.900]that we're really talking about communication here, right?
[00:02:39.710]And so I teach a class on communication, kind of grounded
[00:02:43.670]in Skinner's Verbal Behavior, but really a methods course.
[00:02:47.960]And I make all my students sign a little card
[00:02:50.660]that says I'm committed to making sure
[00:02:52.180]that every student in my class can request things they like,
[00:02:55.950]protest things they don't like.
[00:02:57.840]And I tell them that if they can't,
[00:02:59.250]that they're not really worth their salt as educators.
[00:03:01.320]I'm saying it's really a primary function
[00:03:03.860]of educated students with complex needs to make sure
[00:03:06.080]that they're effective communicators
[00:03:07.710]and certainly go beyond just requesting
[00:03:09.510]and we're going to make sure they can interact
[00:03:11.260]and engage in our academic work
[00:03:13.457]but it's really important for them.
[00:03:15.050]So as I said, there's really no more important repertoire
[00:03:18.660]than communication.
[00:03:20.530]Really the way that we communicate
[00:03:21.910]kind of determines the quality of our lives.
[00:03:23.580]If we can go out and we can ask for things, we can interact,
[00:03:27.330]we're going to be much more effective
[00:03:28.830]in accessing those things that are important to us
[00:03:30.240]and kind of arranging our life to make sure
[00:03:32.650]that we're in a place where we're comfortable.
[00:03:35.940]And again, I think it should be the core programming
[00:03:39.170]for all students with extensive support needs.
[00:03:42.530]And because it is so important
[00:03:44.270]and it has resulted in a robust body of research
[00:03:47.170]and evidence-based practice.
[00:03:48.400]So we know a lot about teaching communication.
[00:03:50.670]I would argue that we're still struggling,
[00:03:52.560]helping our teachers find the time
[00:03:54.830]to program effectively forward,
[00:03:56.570]we're making sure all of our speech pathologists
[00:03:58.950]have all the skills they need
[00:03:59.783]and we have this nice interdisciplinary teaming
[00:04:01.980]to make sure that happens all day long
[00:04:03.900]not just during snack time where the kids making requests
[00:04:06.950]for five goldfish, communication doesn't happen like that.
[00:04:10.200]It's all day long across all these contexts.
[00:04:12.400]And so we have to program to make sure it's intensive
[00:04:16.030]but also naturalistic.
[00:04:17.190]And it can be really difficult for an educator
[00:04:19.690]who has a million other things on their plate, right?
[00:04:23.480]But we know how to do this
[00:04:26.180]in many cases, but as I said, we've really fallen short
[00:04:30.840]probably in terms of dissemination
[00:04:32.380]and making sure that whole educational systems adopt
[00:04:35.800]good practices to make sure kids
[00:04:37.360]have the skills that they need.
[00:04:39.570]Now written communication is another story, right?
[00:04:42.900]And it's not necessarily a happier one.
[00:04:45.150]So there's much less research
[00:04:48.700]on teaching writing to these students,
[00:04:51.810]especially those that have very few vocal skills,
[00:04:55.450]aren't using sign language, have very limited use
[00:04:58.450]of speech entering devices
[00:04:59.930]or PECS, picture-based communication systems.
[00:05:03.570]We're really not sure what to do, right?
[00:05:05.867]And there just really hasn't been
[00:05:07.300]a lot of guidance for practitioners.
[00:05:09.320]And so you see a lot of wild things happen in the classroom.
[00:05:11.960]This is really concerning, right?
[00:05:13.160]Because we should care a lot about written expression.
[00:05:17.940]Writing is powerful, right?
[00:05:19.750]It serves as to communicate a message, right?
[00:05:23.220]And what's great about written expression
[00:05:26.160]is it's a lasting message, right?
[00:05:28.650]I may fire off something to you in conversation,
[00:05:31.900]but if it's there in an email
[00:05:34.340]or on your text message, I'm able to look at that and say,
[00:05:37.220]wow, and reflect upon it.
[00:05:39.560]I'm also able to and during the writing process,
[00:05:42.540]I'm able to revise, edit, design my response
[00:05:46.900]for the very particular intended outcome.
[00:05:50.210]I think that's really powerful
[00:05:51.400]and it's a tool we all want to have access to
[00:05:53.360]and be effective in using.
[00:05:55.830]It's also important to understand that if we're interested
[00:05:58.670]in developing individuals communication repertoires,
[00:06:02.070]I would argue that vocal, I don't think I have to argue
[00:06:04.870]but you guys would agree with me
[00:06:05.890]that if you can communicate vocally, right,
[00:06:08.930]using speech, that's probably the most effective way
[00:06:11.810]because most people unless you're in a deaf community,
[00:06:13.930]right, they understand vocal language.
[00:06:16.580]They may not understand what a little round
[00:06:18.510]that little round picture drawing is a cookie.
[00:06:21.490]They may not understand pictures.
[00:06:22.640]They may not understand signs.
[00:06:23.880]So speech is great.
[00:06:25.580]In a literate society, I would argue that probably writing
[00:06:29.160]is the second best.
[00:06:30.570]You ever see those movies, right?
[00:06:31.517]And the person that's coming out of a coma
[00:06:33.720]and they can't speak yet.
[00:06:35.100]And they point to a piece of paper
[00:06:37.087]and the nurse grabs him a piece of paper
[00:06:38.797]and they write down, "the murderer was," right?
[00:06:42.930]We kind of understand that with speech as it worked,
[00:06:47.770]let's write it down.
[00:06:49.190]So again, it's really powerful.
[00:06:50.450]We want to make sure kids that everybody has access
[00:06:54.490]to some way to communicate in a written expression.
[00:06:59.900]I think it's also important that when we learn
[00:07:03.070]more about writing for this population,
[00:07:04.850]we're going to be better at programming
[00:07:07.320]for AAC usage, right?
[00:07:09.250]So a lot of the research
[00:07:11.160]and using assisted technology around
[00:07:13.400]touching single words, right?
[00:07:15.210]And so if we know how to teach writing in a systematic way
[00:07:20.630]to this population, we might be able to expand the quality,
[00:07:23.750]the link, the things they can do
[00:07:25.770]in terms of using their augmentative
[00:07:28.420]alternative communication systems.
[00:07:32.420]As I mentioned before in my example
[00:07:34.270]of kind of how this was fermented,
[00:07:39.310]I guess my origin story of writing research,
[00:07:42.941]I realized that in most school settings, right?
[00:07:47.990]We're expected to generate some sort of written piece
[00:07:51.690]of information and it may be I'm writing an essay.
[00:07:55.220]It could be circling the correct answer
[00:07:57.860]but in some format or in some sort of fashion,
[00:08:01.950]most teachers are expecting kids to write.
[00:08:04.830]And it's also important to understand that
[00:08:07.160]even if teachers are able to differentiate an instruction
[00:08:11.120]where they've got a couple non-writers in their classroom,
[00:08:15.040]the response effort or the resource it takes
[00:08:19.480]to walk over to an individual student, right?
[00:08:22.790]And say to them, okay, you tell me your answer
[00:08:26.390]while the other 26 kids are writing,
[00:08:28.760]it's not always feasible, right?
[00:08:30.050]It just makes it hard to know the thing
[00:08:31.520]for the teacher to worry about to get into her repertoire.
[00:08:34.100]So it's important for kids to demonstrate
[00:08:37.337]what they know in schools but it's also important for them
[00:08:40.760]to have access to good feedback from their teachers.
[00:08:43.470]Again, because it's just feasible for kids
[00:08:45.940]to be able to develop a permanent product
[00:08:47.940]and the teacher to be able to assess
[00:08:49.170]their understanding at a later time.
[00:08:54.100]It's also important you think about employment.
[00:08:56.780]So there's some data to suggest that employers feel
[00:09:00.570]that public education is letting them down, right?
[00:09:03.380]The kids are graduate,
[00:09:04.630]kids without disabilities are graduating from school
[00:09:07.760]without the skill to compose
[00:09:09.300]an effective professional email, to write a simple report,
[00:09:12.990]to be able to respond to tasks related to their job
[00:09:17.520]and in writing.
[00:09:19.605]And this is problematic.
[00:09:21.200]We know that really one of our weakest areas we think about
[00:09:24.597]the NAEP scores or kind of national report card
[00:09:27.000]is written expression.
[00:09:29.180]We have centers around math instruction
[00:09:32.400]and reading instruction but it seems like written expression
[00:09:35.780]kind of lags behind.
[00:09:36.810]So it's not just my friends here that we're talking about
[00:09:39.100]kids with more severe disabilities, it's really everyone.
[00:09:41.260]We just need to do better in terms of all of our students
[00:09:43.900]helping move the writing forward.
[00:09:45.720]But that being said,
[00:09:46.770]in terms of employment, writing's important, right?
[00:09:50.660]I think about how you get a job, the process,
[00:09:52.620]just take a sec.
[00:09:54.080]Well, you got to fill out an application, right?
[00:09:56.040]And you've got to not only do you fill out an application
[00:09:59.200]for most higher quality jobs,
[00:10:02.660]you're writing some cover letter,
[00:10:04.300]or you're describing your strengths and weaknesses.
[00:10:06.740]You're responding to emails back from the employer asked you
[00:10:09.460]to come in for an interview.
[00:10:12.559]So to get a job and get through the doorway,
[00:10:14.220]writing can be very important.
[00:10:15.820]And then once you're in the job,
[00:10:17.410]everything from checking off a checklist
[00:10:19.900]in a grocery store that you complete your tasks,
[00:10:22.180]signing your name on your punch card, all the way again
[00:10:25.880]to writing reports, respond to emails, to your colleagues,
[00:10:29.470]engaging in customer service interactions.
[00:10:32.410]And then sometimes you're asked every year, right?
[00:10:34.480]To even evaluate yourself.
[00:10:36.070]So almost at every level of employment,
[00:10:40.040]there's often some sort of writing task
[00:10:42.850]and it may not be super sophisticated, but it's there.
[00:10:47.950]So we're talking about a population that already struggles
[00:10:50.850]in terms of employment outcomes, post-secondary outcomes
[00:10:53.900]and in the area of employment,
[00:10:55.800]this serves as another barrier for them.
[00:10:58.910]I also think it's really important to understand
[00:11:00.530]that we've shifted a large proportion
[00:11:04.270]of our social interactions,
[00:11:05.720]excuse me, to social media, right?
[00:11:10.400]So, or digital media.
[00:11:12.860]So you'll sit at a table now and you'll be at a restaurant,
[00:11:16.420]you'll see a young couple talking back and forth
[00:11:19.200]and they're not talking back and forth.
[00:11:20.890]They're sitting at their table,
[00:11:21.780]their food's kind of steaming in the middle, right?
[00:11:23.417]And they're on their phones.
[00:11:25.420]And I'm wondering if they're texting each other
[00:11:26.820]like you look nice today, right?
[00:11:28.197]But the point is, is that we've really shifted away
[00:11:31.240]from this constant vocal interaction.
[00:11:33.050]I was relaying to a friend recently how, as kids,
[00:11:36.120]we were parking lot kids, right?
[00:11:37.600]We would like on a Friday night, it's like
[00:11:39.620]where is everybody hanging out?
[00:11:40.790]And we would drive, right?
[00:11:41.907]And we drive all over town throughout the cool spots
[00:11:44.660]and try to figure out where our friends were hanging out.
[00:11:46.890]And now that just doesn't happen.
[00:11:48.240]Now, it's like, well, first of all, if you want to meet up,
[00:11:51.060]it's easy to find because everybody has a phone with them
[00:11:52.980]all the time, not everyone, but a lot of people.
[00:11:56.720]But people would just have meetups
[00:11:59.650]and people are just texting with each other constantly.
[00:12:02.720]So the idea is that our kids are already,
[00:12:05.440]many of our kids already struggle
[00:12:07.100]in terms of being prevented from access
[00:12:11.030]to interactions with their peers.
[00:12:13.010]Now there's a whole nother segment,
[00:12:15.360]a whole nother vehicle for interaction
[00:12:19.140]that they may not have access to, right?
[00:12:21.460]So if you can't post on social media, on Instagram
[00:12:25.570]or if you're an old person like me, Facebook, right?
[00:12:28.680]And then get your likes and interact with people,
[00:12:31.140]you're missing out a lot.
[00:12:32.390]If you can't text message back and forth
[00:12:34.370]or respond to a text, you're missing a lot.
[00:12:37.510]You're missing out on a lot.
[00:12:38.343]We've done a couple of studies
[00:12:39.176]that we won't talk about today 'cause we've got limited time
[00:12:41.650]but we've done some work with social media
[00:12:45.920]or teaching kids the text message using
[00:12:47.940]some of the writing functions that we're going to
[00:12:49.730]or writing strategies that we're going to address today.
[00:12:53.570]By the way, this is one of my favorite, right?
[00:12:55.230]You guys have probably seen this or,
[00:12:57.507]"I got and A in Chem
[00:12:59.020]WTF, well done!
[00:13:00.267]"Mom, what do you think WTF means?
[00:13:03.080]Well, that's fantastic."
[00:13:06.220]These are always a hoot.
[00:13:07.740]Okay, well, should we care about writing?
[00:13:09.760]Well, I think writing's a means for telling one's story.
[00:13:12.570]I don't know now, I have no hair on my head
[00:13:15.670]but can you guys pick me out of this picture?
[00:13:19.370]I'm not the cardboard cutout of Lionel Richie.
[00:13:23.200]I'm the guy with the turtleneck,
[00:13:24.490]the sweater on the combat boots, right?
[00:13:26.860]So when I was a kid, I wrote, I played music.
[00:13:30.350]People that know me outside of the professional world,
[00:13:33.590]I've played in bands for 30 years.
[00:13:35.280]I've toured Europe, I've put out probably 40 records
[00:13:39.740]and I write lyrics and I enjoy that.
[00:13:43.160]It's a part of who I am.
[00:13:44.530]I love telling my story.
[00:13:45.640]It's a craft, it's enjoyable, but we want to make sure
[00:13:49.160]that kids have that opportunity too.
[00:13:51.610]Sometimes they get extremely therapeutic to write down
[00:13:53.840]what you did.
[00:13:57.740]Some folks enjoy writing stories about other things, right?
[00:14:00.850]It becomes a craft, an art in some way,
[00:14:05.840]and we have a lot of adults with autism, for instance,
[00:14:08.420]that have more language, but they have told their own story
[00:14:12.090]through written expression.
[00:14:13.080]So again, it's another valuable thing
[00:14:15.602]that we wanna make sure kids have access to.
[00:14:18.290]And then finally, I think it's really important
[00:14:19.253]to understand that if we care about writing, right,
[00:14:25.110]excuse me, if we don't have research
[00:14:27.270]on how to teach writing, a bunch of garbage
[00:14:29.650]can get out there, right?
[00:14:30.740]So we know there's a lot of things like,
[00:14:32.910]we have facilitated communication and rapid prompting
[00:14:35.160]where people actually writing for kids, right?
[00:14:37.680]And I understand how that becomes developed.
[00:14:41.120]And people think that it's effective
[00:14:42.870]but it's not dignifying.
[00:14:44.360]It's usually not again sharing the,
[00:14:47.520]reflecting the individual's own voice
[00:14:49.910]but if there's no better way to teach right
[00:14:51.990]and if there's not evidence-based practices for doing that,
[00:14:54.830]then people may go to these kind of over prompting methods
[00:14:58.240]and not be effective.
[00:14:59.100]So we want to just make sure
[00:15:00.100]that there's a body of research out there
[00:15:02.280]so we can cancel out some of this pseudoscience,
[00:15:04.570]some of this non-evidence based stuff that gets out there
[00:15:06.853]that may not be helpful for kids.
[00:15:10.000]So again, not writing.
[00:15:12.490]All right, so I hope for you
[00:15:15.700]that I just made the case that writing's important, right?
[00:15:18.810]It's so important in the lives
[00:15:20.440]and the academic lives, the personal lives,
[00:15:22.320]employing lives of the kids we care about.
[00:15:25.600]But unfortunately, we still see writing
[00:15:27.270]look a lot like this.
[00:15:28.203]This is the classroom picture
[00:15:30.410]that I took a couple of years ago.
[00:15:32.330]And so again, the idea here is we had this kid,
[00:15:35.140]he's got a yellow highlighter pen.
[00:15:36.610]He's got his OT gave him a grip there
[00:15:39.490]probably to be able to have
[00:15:40.800]some better control of his pencil.
[00:15:44.150]And this is his writing activity for the day,
[00:15:48.350]kids tracing over and over and over a highlighter,
[00:15:52.200]God, and materials.
[00:15:53.240]I'll see high school kids and they're working
[00:15:56.480]on completing job application.
[00:15:58.570]It's just this generic photocopied, teachers run off
[00:16:01.460]200 copies of this thing everyday,
[00:16:03.160]get out and practice your personal information
[00:16:05.830]and they're tracing their name and their address.
[00:16:09.670]And what I like to do,
[00:16:12.213]I don't know if you have around you right now,
[00:16:15.650]grab a piece of paper and a pencil.
[00:16:17.670]I'll just wait a second.
[00:16:18.503]Since you might be at your house during this virtually,
[00:16:20.950]you can say, honey, grab me a piece of paper
[00:16:23.800]or interrupt one of your kid's
[00:16:25.170]virtual learning school fest sessions.
[00:16:27.270]Hey, hand me a piece of paper, but just take a second.
[00:16:30.820]And I want you to trace this,
[00:16:34.620]see if you can draw this right here and novice,
[00:16:41.264]I'm not going to make you do this
[00:16:42.450]in this short 60 minute talk that I'm giving
[00:16:45.440]but usually, what I will do in a workshop
[00:16:46.990]or it's not how people trace it a couple of times.
[00:16:49.530]And the first time that's kind of fun.
[00:16:51.620]'Cause you're like, oh, I can do this, right?
[00:16:53.397]And then by the third time, like, okay,
[00:16:55.160]this is kind of tedious, right?
[00:16:57.067]And then I'll ask you to imagine, well, what does this,
[00:17:01.530]what if your whole day was just tracing this image here?
[00:17:05.520]To you, it's an arbitrary set of letters, right?
[00:17:08.030]But it's really Sanskrit and actually means boring.
[00:17:11.940]But that's where it is for a lot of our learners
[00:17:13.753]that there's no meaning behind it.
[00:17:15.440]There's no value to doing it.
[00:17:17.760]You're asking them to do a painful motor task, right?
[00:17:21.150]Just that has no immediate
[00:17:22.900]that for some sort of arbitrary reinforcer like, oh good.
[00:17:25.330]And you get your token or you get a Skittle
[00:17:27.990]if you trace your letter if they're lucky,
[00:17:30.090]oftentimes they just expect them to do it.
[00:17:33.550]So again, I want you to think about
[00:17:35.580]do you subject your students at any point
[00:17:38.520]to these activities where kids are over
[00:17:40.690]and over just copying?
[00:17:43.200]And if you do so, I understand why it happens.
[00:17:45.700]You've got a million things happening,
[00:17:47.530]get a stack of these kids,
[00:17:48.920]get some students that are compliant
[00:17:51.210]that will actually do it, right?
[00:17:52.706]I want you to know it's compliance, right?
[00:17:54.270]It's not that they're engaged
[00:17:55.680]in instruction really is this kind of like do this.
[00:17:58.810]Okay, right?
[00:18:00.290]And they're sitting there and you've got some time
[00:18:02.667]to do all the other things, work with the other kids
[00:18:04.870]that you're using that you're required to support.
[00:18:09.250]But from my perspective, this is not effective.
[00:18:13.090]Is it okay to have kids engage in some trace activity?
[00:18:15.460]Sure, they should be interspersed throughout the day.
[00:18:18.190]It should be done in a meaningful context
[00:18:20.240]not on some arbitrary kind of worksheet.
[00:18:24.860]So how do you get to those types of tasks?
[00:18:28.250]And then I promise
[00:18:29.083]we're going to start getting some strategies
[00:18:30.460]just a little bit.
[00:18:32.049]We want to make one, I think is 'cause writing's hard.
[00:18:34.720]It requires the execution
[00:18:36.160]of a whole bunch of skills all at once,
[00:18:38.300]simultaneously, a lot of prerequisite skills
[00:18:41.210]and as a result, we're not really sure
[00:18:44.120]where to start, right?
[00:18:45.840]I think also our learners are complex.
[00:18:47.600]Some of them come with poor fine motor skills
[00:18:49.693]that make it difficult for them to hand-write
[00:18:51.840]or even use a keyboard.
[00:18:55.000]Some of our folks especially kids with autism
[00:18:57.080]where it's a part of their diagnosis,
[00:18:58.840]they have difficulty acquiring communication skills.
[00:19:02.850]So kids aren't going to write about things
[00:19:04.840]if they don't know what they can call them
[00:19:06.220]or they don't know, they don't have
[00:19:07.720]basic requesting functions
[00:19:09.838]that understands that, oh if I write something,
[00:19:12.470]somebody will respond to it.
[00:19:14.938]And I think sometimes we have this idea
[00:19:16.440]that writing is there's this little writer
[00:19:20.470]inside our brain that kind of gets it out that paper.
[00:19:23.047]And we use that a lot.
[00:19:24.240]We realize, especially, people will talk about that
[00:19:26.013]with kids with autism.
[00:19:27.270]Like, there's just somebody trapped in there.
[00:19:29.787]And I think that holds us back
[00:19:32.772]instead of thinking that, well, you have to have
[00:19:35.990]this sophisticated little speaker in there,
[00:19:39.720]I think it's easier for us to say,
[00:19:41.010]okay, what can the kid do?
[00:19:42.370]What can they not do?
[00:19:43.390]And let's look right in front of us
[00:19:44.820]and see how to get there.
[00:19:45.653]That's what we're going to focus on,
[00:19:46.486]and they wouldn't get the end instruction.
[00:19:48.060]And I think there's a lack of guidance from the research.
[00:19:50.200]So if we look at the research, on the left here,
[00:19:52.770]we've done a couple of reviews for kids with autism.
[00:19:55.480]We've got one that we're preparing now
[00:19:57.480]to send out for publication.
[00:19:59.010]The wonderful doc student soon to be Dr. McClure
[00:20:04.510]out of University of Louisville.
[00:20:07.354]But on the left side here our red owl.
[00:20:10.130]We see that this is the populate.
[00:20:11.650]This is a research on kids
[00:20:12.483]with more severe disabilities, mostly explicit instruction.
[00:20:16.960]We're using ABA, behavioral teaching strategies,
[00:20:19.950]some predictable writing routines,
[00:20:21.670]which we'll talk about a little bit later
[00:20:22.780]and then there's some technology.
[00:20:24.600]But when we talk about kids with autism
[00:20:26.750]that do not have comorbid intellectual,
[00:20:30.150]that's a little bit, there is a wide body of research
[00:20:32.560]that's primarily focused on one strategy;
[00:20:35.300]self-regulated strategy development.
[00:20:37.620]It's explicitly taught.
[00:20:39.550]There are a predictable routine
[00:20:40.990]to which they have to apply it.
[00:20:43.050]But self-regulated strategy development is probably
[00:20:45.720]one of the most sound of intervention procedures
[00:20:49.480]for teaching kids to improve their writing.
[00:20:51.920]Graham and Harris, late 80s, hundreds of studies come on it.
[00:20:57.540]So if you're working with population of kids
[00:20:59.330]with moderate disabilities already have
[00:21:00.750]a lot of language, look up
[00:21:02.510]self-regulated strategy development.
[00:21:04.620]There's an Iris module on it, lots of readings, books,
[00:21:08.630]but it won't be the focus of the day
[00:21:09.960]'cause we're going to be working with those kids
[00:21:12.573]a little bit more extensive support needs.
[00:21:15.540]So what are we going to do about it?
[00:21:17.100]Well, what if we reframe the way
[00:21:18.810]that we thought about teaching writing, right?
[00:21:20.930]So instead of focusing on early syntax,
[00:21:23.550]we focused on interactions
[00:21:24.650]between a writer and a reader, right?
[00:21:26.990]So I write and then somebody reinforces my writing behavior
[00:21:31.950]and we carefully consider this
[00:21:33.510]when planning our instruction.
[00:21:35.120]We think about it.
[00:21:37.480]We're teaching students that often may have
[00:21:40.210]a hard time working for reinforcers that are really delayed.
[00:21:44.120]But when you write, like a general education student,
[00:21:47.870]when they write, when do they get feedback?
[00:21:50.800]Usually, it's when the teacher turns it back in way later.
[00:21:53.430]And we know that for reinforcement
[00:21:56.600]to be a really effective, right?
[00:21:58.940]We're talking seconds, not minutes, not hours, not days.
[00:22:03.310]And so fortunately, a lot of our other kids,
[00:22:04.980]other contingencies kick in, they enjoy writing
[00:22:07.790]their peers are kicking.
[00:22:09.630]Peers are writing.
[00:22:10.710]They don't want to not turn their work in
[00:22:13.180]'cause they're trying to avoid some consequence.
[00:22:14.940]There's all these other factors that play in
[00:22:16.610]that some of our kids that may not impact
[00:22:19.260]some of the learners that we work with.
[00:22:23.220]So what if we did this?
[00:22:24.370]So in general, when we're teaching communication
[00:22:28.140]to kids, right, we teach them first to request.
[00:22:32.200]And the reason we do,
[00:22:33.070]and there was a time, I think, where a lot of the field
[00:22:36.960]was focused on just banging so much vocabulary.
[00:22:39.850]It's like a thousand super-duper picture cards.
[00:22:41.940]Like what's, this what's, this what's this?
[00:22:44.280]Because the idea is if they knew what to talk about,
[00:22:47.000]then they would.
[00:22:48.560]But that's probably not really the case
[00:22:50.820]for many of our folks, really now it's kind of shifted
[00:22:53.110]that we want kids to understand
[00:22:54.509]that communication is the interaction, right?
[00:22:57.470]And that means I then the most powerful way
[00:23:00.160]to teach that as I request, I say, can I have this?
[00:23:03.210]You give it to me.
[00:23:04.043]I've a glass of water now, right?
[00:23:07.930]And then I get a reinforcer and I get access to that.
[00:23:12.490]It's powerful, and suddenly it makes all the people
[00:23:14.230]in my life important like, oh, you, you!
[00:23:18.130]All of these people are around me
[00:23:18.963]because when interact with them, things happen.
[00:23:21.690]That's understanding communication.
[00:23:24.290]What's this, chicken, right?
[00:23:26.660]If you hold a picture of a chicken
[00:23:27.920]and then somebody says, "Good job!"
[00:23:30.390]I don't really get anything about it
[00:23:31.770]unless I really care about your attention, right?
[00:23:33.950]There's just not that same connection.
[00:23:35.650]So now we see that a better model
[00:23:38.940]is we teach kids to request to care about their environment.
[00:23:41.700]We see reductions in problem behavior,
[00:23:43.920]we see better engagement.
[00:23:45.950]And then very quickly we start billing them.
[00:23:50.470]We teach them to label things
[00:23:52.314]and name things in their environment.
[00:23:53.720]So they had some things to talk about
[00:23:55.240]and they get more sophisticated.
[00:23:56.820]And they're requesting repertoire,
[00:23:58.600]they participate in academic activities.
[00:24:00.380]Then we move to conversation
[00:24:02.060]when they're actually sometimes talking about
[00:24:03.490]things that are there and not there
[00:24:05.300]which requires a much more complex repertoire.
[00:24:08.290]And a lot of our kids have more extensive support needs.
[00:24:10.340]This is the area they kind of fall down, right?
[00:24:13.220]What if we did that way to writing?
[00:24:14.850]So first, we teach them to write about access, right?
[00:24:18.170]To access things,
[00:24:19.003]then we teach them to write about what they see,
[00:24:20.850]and then we teach the write about what they know.
[00:24:23.030]Hmm, all right.
[00:24:24.990]So think about this.
[00:24:26.010]Look at this kind of three-term contingency, right?
[00:24:28.640]So there on the left column,
[00:24:30.500]we've got some antecedents, in the middle,
[00:24:33.000]they have to write and the far right, we have consequences.
[00:24:37.370]So which one of these you think would be the most meaningful
[00:24:41.040]to see a piece of paper and pencil,
[00:24:43.590]they're expected to write for pleasure, right?
[00:24:47.640]There's a paper, a pencil there.
[00:24:49.100]A favorite snack we asked them to write
[00:24:51.530]and they get access to that snack.
[00:24:53.130]Or a teacher says, I need you to write this task.
[00:24:56.160]They give you a prompt, the student writes,
[00:24:57.610]and then the teacher says, "good job"
[00:24:59.410]or if it's right, they doesn't mark up their paper.
[00:25:02.900]Which one is probably the most pleasurable,
[00:25:04.430]most meaningful to student at the beginning?
[00:25:07.870]Yeah, teaching them the right for reinforcers.
[00:25:10.350]All right, so let's talk about this.
[00:25:11.540]So maybe what we want to do in early writing instruction
[00:25:14.950]is teach students to exchange, copy
[00:25:16.940]or write words for a specified reinforcer.
[00:25:20.910]So there's a cookie present.
[00:25:22.400]Ooh, right.
[00:25:24.510]Writes the word cookie.
[00:25:25.900]Or we provide a model at the student can copy, right?
[00:25:29.840]They write it.
[00:25:30.840]It could be a highlighter, some sort of stimulus prompt
[00:25:33.560]or the highlighted word cookie that they trace.
[00:25:36.510]And then they get access to it.
[00:25:39.810]I first started thinking about this.
[00:25:41.650]I was in the late 2000s,
[00:25:44.940]I was working with a preschool student.
[00:25:46.390]This student had some kind of stereotypical behavior.
[00:25:49.130]So basically, what some people will call stimming
[00:25:52.170]but essentially he would write words, right?
[00:25:55.030]Just, and they would be words that he recognized
[00:25:57.600]from like videos at home, just on a white board,
[00:26:01.110]kind of messy but no real functional purpose.
[00:26:04.890]Well, we said, what if we did this?
[00:26:06.640]We knew he liked goldfish.
[00:26:08.310]So we showed him the word fish
[00:26:11.050]and we prompted him the write fish.
[00:26:12.330]And we gave him a goldfish.
[00:26:14.050]And then we showed him the word fish.
[00:26:15.410]He wrote it, goldfish.
[00:26:16.900]And before it, it's like fish, fish, fish.
[00:26:19.450]So we shaped his responses from these kind of like,
[00:26:23.410]it'd be like MGM, like the bottom of these videos,
[00:26:26.720]to actual stimuli.
[00:26:27.830]And then we started introducing more and before you knew it
[00:26:29.523]it's like, oh, I can control my environment
[00:26:32.150]through written expression.
[00:26:35.480]So other ways that we might be able
[00:26:38.470]to make this more meaningful.
[00:26:40.310]So think about, we could have kids instead of like
[00:26:43.080]in our example, this guy, Nick writing his name
[00:26:45.420]over and over again, I showed you a little bit ago.
[00:26:48.430]We can have them, the same task could be highlighted.
[00:26:51.220]It could be support.
[00:26:52.053]It could be a model there, but we do it.
[00:26:54.190]They write their name to sign
[00:26:55.660]in and out of preferred activities, right?
[00:26:58.270]So now if I want to use the computer, I sign in.
[00:27:01.370]So again, we can use these embedded trials
[00:27:03.230]to strengthen all the...
[00:27:05.156]If we're working with the OT
[00:27:06.910]and we're trying to strengthen our grasp
[00:27:10.450]and our fine motor skills,
[00:27:12.110]we can do those things, things that we can embed them
[00:27:14.120]throughout the day.
[00:27:16.450]Maybe writing a message to their peers.
[00:27:18.810]So you can really see if you've worked
[00:27:21.400]with especially older kids,
[00:27:24.170]you really see it turn on sometimes engagement
[00:27:27.000]when another peer, a peer without a disability's available,
[00:27:30.180]can interact with them.
[00:27:31.380]And it can be really powerful.
[00:27:33.500]So now maybe we're teaching kids same supports in place
[00:27:36.945]but it's really about the context.
[00:27:38.650]They exchange a message with a peer,
[00:27:40.890]the peer writes back to them
[00:27:42.340]and then we're facilitating some sort of peer interaction.
[00:27:45.780]Maybe we play like a waiter game.
[00:27:48.010]So every elementary school always seems
[00:27:51.210]to still have the snack periods or breakfast in the morning.
[00:27:54.010]So now we have kids, we have a list of words, right?
[00:27:57.580]Of food items.
[00:27:58.413]They can write down what they want to make their order.
[00:28:00.830]We're practicing reading skill.
[00:28:01.980]We have another kid that's reading them,
[00:28:03.350]handing things to them, again, we can do it within a snack,
[00:28:06.220]but there's lots of, again,
[00:28:07.610]another meaningful way that is actually
[00:28:10.920]kind of an analog to what happens in real life.
[00:28:12.557]You go to the restaurant, somebody takes their order.
[00:28:14.830]So again, we're connecting
[00:28:15.880]to some kind of real life functions out there
[00:28:18.300]beyond the classroom.
[00:28:20.470]Googling, and I just bring this example up.
[00:28:23.000]So we had an individual that was older
[00:28:24.920]was engaged in a lot of aggressive behaviors.
[00:28:28.840]And so I came to visit him
[00:28:30.870]at the beginning of the new school year.
[00:28:33.700]And he was sitting in front of a computer
[00:28:35.060]and he was just typing words.
[00:28:36.410]And I said, well, what's he doing?
[00:28:37.630]And the teacher said, "Oh, well
[00:28:38.690]we're doing some vocational training."
[00:28:39.880]And I said too and I said,
[00:28:42.105]what do you mean vocational training?
[00:28:43.530]She goes, "Well, he's practicing data entry."
[00:28:45.500]I was like, well, what if he just writes in words.
[00:28:47.020]There's not really like a place that he's typing these in.
[00:28:49.330]You've got to take data and put it in a specific location.
[00:28:52.580]She goes, "Okay, look he's not hitting me
[00:28:54.460]when he's doing this.
[00:28:55.800]So is that cool?" (laughs)
[00:28:59.050]And I was like, okay, no, but yes,
[00:29:02.780]I understand why it's happening.
[00:29:05.000]And this was a dangerous fellow.
[00:29:06.660]So I really do understand why this isn't happening.
[00:29:08.470]But basically what we did is we said,
[00:29:09.910]let's develop a list for him.
[00:29:11.200]We know the types of things that he likes
[00:29:13.450]and we developed the list that he can now copy.
[00:29:16.130]And we taught him how to copy of those
[00:29:18.000]into a Google Search engine hit Enter.
[00:29:23.390]So now he could get images,
[00:29:24.900]videos of some of his favorite things.
[00:29:26.680]So now we've made it more functional for him
[00:29:29.370]and gave him control using that kind of browser
[00:29:34.270]by writing words that were meaningful to him.
[00:29:38.901]And then in some cases, especially our kids with,
[00:29:42.114]that already had some writing repertoires,
[00:29:43.780]let them write about their things that they care about.
[00:29:47.270]So I've had some, all of us, right,
[00:29:49.450]that have worked in the area of autism.
[00:29:50.740]I have some friends that had
[00:29:51.573]some really unique interests, right?
[00:29:53.910]And we let them write about,
[00:29:55.130]little guy that was into World War II,
[00:29:57.370]a student that was in the "Harry Potter."
[00:30:01.530]Whatever they're into,
[00:30:03.310]use that as a opportunity to be able to build skills.
[00:30:07.660]Now I know they can't write about that all the time, right?
[00:30:10.070]I know that especially
[00:30:11.600]when they're going to general education settings,
[00:30:13.780]the teacher asked them to write about a specific passage.
[00:30:16.820]They can't just choose to write about SpongeBob
[00:30:20.280]in most cases.
[00:30:21.890]So you'll have to use some different procedures, but again,
[00:30:25.470]when you're working on skills,
[00:30:27.980]building skills, sentence structure, punctuation,
[00:30:31.020]use an opportunity for them
[00:30:31.853]to write about something they like.
[00:30:33.350]So it becomes more pleasant.
[00:30:34.570]You're able to work within that context.
[00:30:37.042]And it's so much more meaningful, I think,
[00:30:40.990]than asking them to work on these skills
[00:30:43.530]within something they aren't been there with.
[00:30:45.340]They don't care about.
[00:30:46.250]I'll never forget this guy we were working with
[00:30:48.477]and a teacher's task was,
[00:30:51.150]or she said to the classroom,
[00:30:53.217]"All right, I want you to write..."
[00:30:54.440]I don't know if it was "Ulysses" or something.
[00:30:56.420]She goes, "but I want you to write it
[00:30:57.570]from the perspective of a woman."
[00:31:00.440]This little guy with autism was like,
[00:31:03.137]"But he wasn't a woman."
[00:31:04.920]Like, why?
[00:31:06.620]He just could not get his head around.
[00:31:08.080]Why would I want to do this?
[00:31:09.520]How could I do this?
[00:31:11.700]And actually it became a meltdown to which we had to respond
[00:31:16.700]and do a little reframing of instructional tasks
[00:31:19.240]and work with the general education teacher
[00:31:20.610]requiring that to happen.
[00:31:23.090]But yeah.
[00:31:23.923]So again, just make sure that it's connected to makes sense.
[00:31:29.880]Another thing that you can do, as I mentioned before,
[00:31:31.760]is having them work with peers.
[00:31:32.900]So one, peers as community partners,
[00:31:35.670]peers as co-writers, having kids write together.
[00:31:39.300]There's been a couple studies.
[00:31:40.750]My old advisor, Belva Collins,
[00:31:44.160]kind of I honestly think of her
[00:31:45.160]as one of the systematic instruction guru folks.
[00:31:49.650]It's a terrible name guru, but this has a lot of experience
[00:31:52.187]and did a lot of that work at UK,
[00:31:54.040]kind of a systematic replication showing time delay assist
[00:31:57.920]and the waste prompts.
[00:31:58.800]All the simultaneous prompting,
[00:32:00.357]all these procedures can be applied
[00:32:02.650]across all these many contexts.
[00:32:05.140]But anyway, in 2001, she taught kids peer tutors to work
[00:32:10.640]with high school students to teach them the right letters.
[00:32:13.640]When we actually used to write people handwritten letters
[00:32:16.730]during that time there was another study
[00:32:20.890]just kind of right after that where Bedrosian and colleagues
[00:32:23.770]they actually use peers and peers without disabilities.
[00:32:26.600]It was a peer without disability on peer that use AAC device
[00:32:29.560]to interact and ask questions
[00:32:31.410]and to kind of build passages together
[00:32:34.370]and do some co-writing.
[00:32:35.740]So again, another opportunities to make this
[00:32:37.730]more reinforcing and meaningful to our students.
[00:32:41.400]So I've talked so far today a lot about words
[00:32:43.317]and I just want you to know
[00:32:44.380]that some kids will not be able, no matter how hard we try,
[00:32:49.440]will not be able to produce writing
[00:32:53.100]that's going to look similar to the writing
[00:32:55.589]that is expected by probably typically developing children
[00:33:01.360]in their classroom settings, right?
[00:33:02.820]There's some kids who'll still struggle
[00:33:06.150]with developing a complex language repertoires,
[00:33:09.740]then the fine motor skills.
[00:33:11.750]And so as a result of this,
[00:33:13.300]we're going to probably use heavy technology supports,
[00:33:17.240]pictures, peer supports, sometimes written approximations.
[00:33:21.520]So we talk about kids writing words
[00:33:24.070]and kids are going to intersect
[00:33:25.990]with the writing process in multiple ways.
[00:33:28.640]So I want you to think of this.
[00:33:29.473]Some kids are going to be able to spell, right?
[00:33:31.760]They're going to be able to put letters together
[00:33:33.875]to be able to write words.
[00:33:35.230]Some kids are going to have to look at a whole word to put,
[00:33:37.990]to develop sentences.
[00:33:40.290]Some kids we're going to have sentence starters
[00:33:43.080]and they're going to make selections.
[00:33:44.270]I want a car, I see a car kind of thing, right?
[00:33:49.880]Some kids it could be they watch and they select a sentence
[00:33:53.800]the correct sentence that matches the scenario, the setup.
[00:33:57.230]So these are all, in my perspective, types of writing.
[00:34:00.990]Picture exchange, once you get beyond phase one and two,
[00:34:04.130]right, where kids are putting letters together,
[00:34:06.070]actually phase four, right?
[00:34:07.790]I want...
[00:34:08.960]Once kids are starting to put these pictures together,
[00:34:12.040]we're getting towards sentence structure there.
[00:34:15.440]There's a lot of tools that are available.
[00:34:16.840]And these there's probably even more current.
[00:34:19.080]A lot of the studies that I used
[00:34:20.320]over the last couple of years, we used clicker sentences
[00:34:23.770]'cause it was pretty cheap. (coughs)
[00:34:26.030]And we're able to just develop simple frames
[00:34:28.460]where are simple arrays of words
[00:34:31.030]for kids to make selections.
[00:34:32.947]And there's clicker which is even bigger.
[00:34:35.104]You can have more words, keyboards, add pictures,
[00:34:40.150]just a lot more flexibility.
[00:34:41.630]It's kind of like the Maserati whereas clicker sentences,
[00:34:43.547]it's kinda like the bicycle.
[00:34:45.770]It's much, much cheaper, first author
[00:34:49.780]from our folks at UNC Chapel Hill.
[00:34:52.840]Just a lot of great resources out there
[00:34:54.360]but just understand that some of our kids,
[00:34:55.900]this is where they're going to be, and it's okay.
[00:34:58.540]So right now, I just kinda like to go through quickly
[00:35:00.650]and hit a couple of important areas
[00:35:03.350]in terms of some strategies for instruction.
[00:35:07.150]So one, spelling, let's talk about spelling.
[00:35:09.220]So spelling is hard, right?
[00:35:10.700]Whereas reading requires the decoding of visual stimuli,
[00:35:13.960]spelling requires us to end code
[00:35:15.780]which means we've got to visualize words.
[00:35:18.390]We got to know what they sound like
[00:35:20.020]and then spit them out, then write them down, right?
[00:35:22.370]And that can be very difficult
[00:35:24.610]for a lot of our individuals, requires memory,
[00:35:27.720]knowing letter sounds and a lot of other skills in there.
[00:35:31.490]So it can be really tough for our kids to get.
[00:35:33.430]So there've been a couple kind of generic strategies,
[00:35:36.270]not generic strategies, but for our population,
[00:35:38.660]they've been applied with some efficacy.
[00:35:40.400]So one, good old match to sample techniques.
[00:35:45.160]And so this is an example of an old behavioral study
[00:35:48.550]where essentially there's a picture, a model's presented.
[00:35:53.030]The students are learned to copy that model,
[00:35:55.440]right, with the keyboard.
[00:35:57.010]And then the model, at some point,
[00:35:58.830]the model is faded away and kids are asked
[00:36:01.260]to do it from memory.
[00:36:02.190]And of course reinforcement if they get it correct
[00:36:04.580]or a little beep it's incorrect or no feedback
[00:36:08.130]but this was some of the early work in spelling.
[00:36:11.540]You'll see some of that applied in the two strategies
[00:36:13.930]I'm going to show you today.
[00:36:14.930]So two strategies that have been demonstrated
[00:36:18.700]to literature are one, chaining.
[00:36:21.400]So in chaining, your thinking about your...
[00:36:24.530]So this is for kids that will have
[00:36:26.340]some sort of copying skills
[00:36:28.540]or kind of match the sample skills
[00:36:30.210]so they can see M and they can find in our keyboard, right?
[00:36:34.290]So in this example, this is Purrazzella and Mechling
[00:36:36.810]when the Mechling was at UNC Wilmington is recently retired
[00:36:39.640]but really done a lot of fantastic work
[00:36:41.720]in the applications and technologies to our population.
[00:36:44.770]But anyway, and this is an example from their 2013 study.
[00:36:48.550]And so they would have a picture of an item, right?
[00:36:51.120]They had the word milk and the first step
[00:36:52.980]is that students would copy milk
[00:36:54.960]and then they would get reinforced like, yeah, you got it.
[00:36:57.510]When they met that criteria,
[00:36:58.343]and then the first letter would be faded out, right?
[00:37:01.437]And then when they met the next one,
[00:37:02.990]it'd be the first two letters and so forth.
[00:37:05.090]And then at the end there would be lines
[00:37:05.923]and then they would pay the lines out.
[00:37:08.760]So this is a fantastic, simple strategy to apply.
[00:37:12.840]The challenge as as you can probably see
[00:37:14.920]is that it takes a long time to do, right?
[00:37:17.430]So it takes a quite a period of time for it
[00:37:19.780]'cause you got to get the criteria in at each level.
[00:37:21.980]So this isn't going to develop a huge spelling repertoire
[00:37:24.960]but when you're having difficulty,
[00:37:26.970]teach your kids to spell their names,
[00:37:28.930]basic kind of functional words,
[00:37:30.560]this might be a great routine.
[00:37:32.960]Another one, so if you were doing this with me,
[00:37:37.477]and they asked you to type this,
[00:37:39.580]if they say biscuit and you write biscuit, you're like,
[00:37:41.947]this is a biscuit, but this is an arbitrary word to make it,
[00:37:48.270]to make it challenging for you.
[00:37:49.540]So you would copy it.
[00:37:51.260]And then I would say do it again, copy this,
[00:37:54.679]then this, then this, then this.
[00:37:59.690]By the end of this task, if you want to try this,
[00:38:01.840]I'd ask you when you're watching this back later,
[00:38:03.790]I want you to encourage you to slow down
[00:38:05.240]and give yourself a chance to try it.
[00:38:07.685]And then you'd be able to smell it by the end.
[00:38:11.480]Another strategy is called copy, cover, compare.
[00:38:13.890]So in copy, cover, compare, we present a list of words.
[00:38:16.890]So we take a piece of paper
[00:38:18.290]and we fold it in fourths, right?
[00:38:19.860]And then what we do is we've kind of walked through this.
[00:38:23.230]So let's say the word to tonic
[00:38:25.420]and you can have the words already made for the students,
[00:38:27.507]the paper already folded.
[00:38:29.010]So the paper's folded in kind of like a diamond shape.
[00:38:33.200]You can fold it in 1/2 and fold each insight on itself.
[00:38:36.270]So you ask them, so you give them the word
[00:38:38.750]and then you asked the students to copy the word.
[00:38:41.760]Once they copy the word, then they fold it over
[00:38:44.560]so they can't see it,
[00:38:45.750]and then they write the word on their own.
[00:38:48.250]If it's correct,
[00:38:49.210]yay, they get a little point, little positive feedback.
[00:38:51.640]If not, they write it in the next column.
[00:38:54.220]And you can imagine this would be a great activity
[00:38:56.160]for independent learning because one, students
[00:38:58.720]are actually learning new skills,
[00:39:01.220]but you can have the materials prepared for them.
[00:39:03.330]Once they understand the process, you give it.
[00:39:04.783]They're actually working, going through
[00:39:07.440]the copy, cover, compare strategy.
[00:39:09.470]And it's independent work
[00:39:11.380]that is probably that focus on acquisition
[00:39:15.200]versus a lot of our independent tasks,
[00:39:16.850]which are kind of matching
[00:39:18.259]and things that they probably already had acquired.
[00:39:21.840]So the really great strategy here,
[00:39:24.873]and I would recommend at any point,
[00:39:26.680]you guys give it a shot.
[00:39:28.110]So if you want to try it, here are some words for you.
[00:39:30.490]So if you want to play back at your own pace,
[00:39:34.890]try curmudgeon, try new Schwab
[00:39:38.000]and see if you can teach yourself to spell these words
[00:39:40.910]if they're not already in your repertoire.
[00:39:43.340]All right, so let's talk now about
[00:39:44.173]some of the work that I've done over the last year
[00:39:46.460]and that last year, last several years.
[00:39:49.370]So first, we would talk about sentence writing.
[00:39:51.150]Sentences are really important.
[00:39:54.189]And the first thing, when you think about
[00:39:55.420]all of these as one, what should the purpose be
[00:39:58.240]on kids learning to request?
[00:39:59.740]Are they writing about something?
[00:40:00.987]Are they trying to develop conversational skills?
[00:40:05.190]Basically, what are students going to get out of writing?
[00:40:07.550]Then you have to think of where they are.
[00:40:08.920]So they're gonna be hand writers.
[00:40:10.310]Do they have some spelling skills?
[00:40:13.256]Are they going to be writing whole words?
[00:40:15.480]And then how are they going to produce that?
[00:40:17.190]Again, what type of technology we're going to use?
[00:40:19.970]So sentences are really important, right?
[00:40:22.180]Because they're kind of like miniature compositions.
[00:40:25.650]A really good sentence can tell us a lot.
[00:40:27.910]For a lot of us, it tells us, for a lot of our learners,
[00:40:30.450]it tells a little bit more about
[00:40:31.343]what they're trying to get at.
[00:40:32.560]So for instance, if a student writes the word bear and says
[00:40:35.600]I want a bear, then they may be asking
[00:40:37.800]for this little toy bear sitting on your desk.
[00:40:40.030]But if they say bear and they write, I see a bear,
[00:40:43.490]it's probably, and you're in Colorado.
[00:40:44.860]That probably means run, right?
[00:40:46.650]So putting nouns and stimuli
[00:40:50.820]within sentence frames really opens the door
[00:40:54.430]to be able to provide more clear messages
[00:40:56.690]and actually give a better,
[00:40:57.760]more specific response from the reader.
[00:41:02.390]So the first thing we want to do
[00:41:03.540]when we're starting all this, we're thinking about
[00:41:04.900]predictable routines and predictable routines
[00:41:06.980]are what's the simplest structure
[00:41:08.590]that can be used to communicate an intended message?
[00:41:11.850]What constitutes a resume cover letter,
[00:41:13.760]a simple story, a text message.
[00:41:15.570]What would be the framework?
[00:41:16.770]And so most of the studies
[00:41:18.060]that I'm going to show you now we picked up a format
[00:41:22.300]and we taught students that format
[00:41:24.270]but to insert different nouns,
[00:41:27.080]stimulus, subjects within the format.
[00:41:29.710]So in this and these examples here,
[00:41:31.960]one of our early, early we've taught simple stories.
[00:41:34.440]So robot went to space.
[00:41:36.280]Robot saw Yoda, robot was happy,
[00:41:38.150]but then we interchanged, SpongeBob went to school.
[00:41:40.380]SpongeBob saw Prince, SpongeBob was happy.
[00:41:42.860]And so we taught the simple sentence structure
[00:41:45.210]but we taught them to rotate different stimuli
[00:41:48.630]within those sentences, in different words
[00:41:50.530]within those sentences.
[00:41:51.670]And another study, we used the template like this.
[00:41:53.450]So again, we taught kids to write,
[00:41:54.717]we had two different templates
[00:41:56.890]and we'd show them different videos
[00:41:58.690]and they would write the story of those videos
[00:42:02.210]using this template.
[00:42:03.750]So the idea is they get the structure.
[00:42:06.250]Over time, they learn the structure
[00:42:08.280]and then they can just insert new stimuli in there.
[00:42:11.030]So I see a cat, I see a cow, I show a picture of a dog.
[00:42:13.950]They're going to write, I see a dog
[00:42:15.510]without me having to teach them the whole sentence.
[00:42:19.540]So there's a great scope and sequence
[00:42:22.240]for teaching sentence writing.
[00:42:23.920]And it's from early work,
[00:42:25.250]Kameenui and Simmons, really wonderful text
[00:42:27.430]that's been around for a long time.
[00:42:29.350]Basically, it breaks down for explicit instruction,
[00:42:32.670]multiple content areas, but they suggest that a scope
[00:42:36.030]of sequence for set and try and might start
[00:42:38.060]with teaching kids to understand the rule,
[00:42:41.060]a sentence named somebody or something
[00:42:42.990]then tells more that's basically it.
[00:42:45.390]And so what the first step in that would be teaching kids
[00:42:49.520]to identify actual sentences that match.
[00:42:53.190]So you might present a picture,
[00:42:54.540]you might present these three options.
[00:42:56.320]I see a dog, I see a cell.
[00:42:58.050]I see, see, see.
[00:42:59.510]So one is not a sentence.
[00:43:00.910]One is not accurate.
[00:43:02.390]And then one is the correct response, right?
[00:43:04.690]And so you can use a system of least prompting procedure.
[00:43:08.090]So you present the task ascent again and say,
[00:43:10.460]find the sentence, find the right sentence, right?
[00:43:13.470]And so if they can do it independently, yay.
[00:43:15.930]If they don't, then I might point
[00:43:17.820]to the picture of the cell, what is it?
[00:43:19.540]Then I run my next prompt level, if they respond, yay,
[00:43:23.260]if they don't, you wait five more seconds
[00:43:25.270]then you say the cell is the person or a thing.
[00:43:28.950]And are I am the person a thing, seeing a cell tells more,
[00:43:32.470]and you would be able to kind of clarify for them
[00:43:34.880]and give them the correct answer.
[00:43:38.360]After that, you want kids to be able to complete sentences
[00:43:40.687]the name somebody or name somebody
[00:43:45.030]and tell them more about him.
[00:43:46.290]So in this picture, this is actually me
[00:43:48.250]from my rock and roll days,
[00:43:49.700]the little flip there on stage, the man flips.
[00:43:53.550]So again, same thing, use constant time delay,
[00:43:55.870]maybe procedure, so you're presenting
[00:43:57.640]lots of these pictures.
[00:43:58.890]You're having the individuals.
[00:44:00.170]If they five seconds to get the right response, if not,
[00:44:02.640]you prompt the correct response.
[00:44:04.640]But again, so the next thing is teaching them
[00:44:06.240]to complete sentences, right?
[00:44:08.680]Then we have them teach a very simple sentence
[00:44:10.840]that kind of identifies
[00:44:11.830]the main thing about a picture, right?
[00:44:13.950]So I see a whale, right?
[00:44:16.870]And then we say, we want a sentence that identify something
[00:44:21.020]but then tells more about it.
[00:44:22.490]So the whale is wet or the whale is,
[00:44:26.540]well, there's a blue in that are white.
[00:44:29.040]And so again, we're teaching them to construct things
[00:44:32.170]about the subject in the sentence.
[00:44:35.590]So a couple of years ago, we did a series of studies.
[00:44:37.430]I'm going to kinda just show you one of those.
[00:44:39.300]So, and they go kind of by this logic.
[00:44:42.000]So if you want to take your pencil and paper out right now,
[00:44:44.910]let's do a little practice.
[00:44:46.350]So pretend this is a sentence, right?
[00:44:48.210]So again, I'm giving you arbitrary stimulants
[00:44:50.340]so you kind of understand what it's like.
[00:44:54.230]So I want you to copy it.
[00:44:55.490]So I'm going to say, write a sentence about this picture
[00:44:57.938]and I want you to copy this right now.
[00:44:59.554]So I'll give you about 10 seconds to do that.
[00:45:02.630]So copy XIX ZTZTT FISH.
[00:45:07.500]Again, don't run. (giggles)
[00:45:09.540]I know you know how to write a sentence about that picture
[00:45:11.330]but I want you to copy this response.
[00:45:15.230]All right, then we go to the next one,
[00:45:17.550]write a sentence about the picture.
[00:45:20.850]So write this again.
[00:45:26.420]Okay, next, write a sentence about the picture, right on.
[00:45:35.930]And then if I show you this, right, I say
[00:45:38.070]write a sentence about the picture without the prompt,
[00:45:42.110]the idea is that if you've noticed the XIX ZTZTT
[00:45:46.930]all remain same throughout all of these.
[00:45:48.750]So at some point you should have been able
[00:45:50.840]to start picking up, Oh, XIX is how this starts
[00:45:54.120]and that's how our learners get it, right?
[00:45:57.310]So we did a series of studies, in general,
[00:45:59.980]they all involve, we present some sort of picture
[00:46:01.910]and directed to write about it.
[00:46:03.690]We use prompt either time delay
[00:46:05.460]or our assistant waist prompts procedure.
[00:46:08.550]And then we reinforced very quick, immediately,
[00:46:10.720]right after the kid responded.
[00:46:11.940]So I'm going to share one of the story.
[00:46:13.630]One of the studies one, the first ones
[00:46:15.400]and this is about teaching the sentences.
[00:46:16.830]It was published a couple of years ago
[00:46:18.280]and focused on autism and developmental disabilities.
[00:46:22.040]But the teacher would say,
[00:46:22.873]write a sentence about what you want, right?
[00:46:24.850]And so there would be a picture of,
[00:46:27.935]there would be a potato chip.
[00:46:29.150]So we do a little preference assessment.
[00:46:31.090]What do you want to work for?
[00:46:32.090]And they would select one and say
[00:46:33.510]write a sentence about what you want.
[00:46:36.210]Then after that, we taught reticence about what you see.
[00:46:38.517]So we showed them a picture on a book
[00:46:40.377]or we showed them a picture.
[00:46:41.693]And then we, that we'd say,
[00:46:43.125]all right, write a sentence about what you see.
[00:46:46.390]Then we would say, write a sentence about the
[00:46:48.357]and we'd show them a picture in a book.
[00:46:53.210]And so each of those, so basically in the first set,
[00:46:59.530]write about what you want, the sentence was I want a...
[00:47:03.716]And the second set after they've mastered that
[00:47:07.170]we would teach them eyes and I see a sentence.
[00:47:09.600]And then after that, we would teach them the blank is blank.
[00:47:12.870]So during the teaching procedure,
[00:47:14.790]so let's say let's go to, I want to, right?
[00:47:17.080]So we would present the request for a couple of days.
[00:47:21.330]We made it completely airless.
[00:47:23.770]So the kids already had some copying skill
[00:47:26.380]or matching skills.
[00:47:27.460]So we would show them we already had
[00:47:30.160]index cards presented, completed,
[00:47:33.000]and we showed them the index cards that I want to chip.
[00:47:35.380]And we would do this.
[00:47:36.440]I, and then point to the word for them, want.
[00:47:42.300]And the reason we did this is because we noticed
[00:47:44.180]that if we just used our finger, right?
[00:47:47.040]Then the students would just stare at our finger.
[00:47:48.490]They wouldn't look up at the sentence,
[00:47:50.360]so we'd go, I want a chip.
[00:47:54.830]And then we give it to them immediately
[00:47:56.130]after they responded.
[00:47:57.350]Then after a couple of days, we would wait.
[00:47:58.970]And so it would look like this,
[00:48:01.030]write a sentence about what you want.
[00:48:03.590]And the students would go, I want, if they made an error,
[00:48:07.480]then we would flash the card
[00:48:09.400]that we'd let them finish it, right?
[00:48:12.050]Or excuse me, if they stopped, we would flash the card.
[00:48:16.340]Or if they made an error, we would erase the last word
[00:48:18.640]and have them write the sentence.
[00:48:21.890]So what we found again is that students were able
[00:48:24.480]to acquire it pretty quickly.
[00:48:27.210]So you can just kind of look at one piece of data here.
[00:48:29.980]I want, I see in the blank and blank.
[00:48:31.930]So this is one participant here in the middle.
[00:48:33.870]If you notice, once they learn the first one,
[00:48:35.900]they got the second one pretty quick
[00:48:37.120]because all they had to do is insert one word, right?
[00:48:40.930]And the bottom one was a little bit harder for our learners
[00:48:43.300]because now they had to go, okay, the whale is blue.
[00:48:46.820]They had to know what a whale was.
[00:48:48.810]They had to know what blue was.
[00:48:50.310]And we did pre-assess
[00:48:52.990]and made sure the students knew the words
[00:48:54.650]before starting that.
[00:48:56.143]So they already had sight word reading skills
[00:48:58.520]and it wasn't basically we would present the iPad to them.
[00:49:02.787]And we'd say, find the, so again,
[00:49:04.950]it was more of a listener kind of response find the,
[00:49:07.420]and they would be able to identify,
[00:49:08.670]so we did that before we started.
[00:49:11.220]So they also did some generalization.
[00:49:12.590]And remember, they only had some in some of these instances,
[00:49:17.360]they only got like four or five sessions on a sentence type,
[00:49:19.770]which was pretty great.
[00:49:22.050]We saw I wanted to chip, see fish, fish is hungry.
[00:49:25.320]These are all things
[00:49:26.153]that we didn't teach during instruction.
[00:49:27.970]I want the tickle, penguin, the shark is blue.
[00:49:31.250]I want the candy, I the shark, the shark black.
[00:49:33.670]So again, going from single words to these units,
[00:49:37.060]it was pretty exciting.
[00:49:38.550]We did several other studies
[00:49:39.830]after that kind of developing the complexity.
[00:49:42.210]So we did some things where we mixed up.
[00:49:46.000]So we'd teach them the right multiple sentences
[00:49:47.730]about the same picture, right?
[00:49:49.970]So what color is it?
[00:49:51.170]What is it doing?
[00:49:52.070]How does it feel?
[00:49:53.740]We taught in our final study, which was focused
[00:49:58.030]on the journal of autism developmental disabilities.
[00:50:00.670]We really mixed it up.
[00:50:01.890]So we draw a picture.
[00:50:03.730]And from that picture, we draw different types of sentence.
[00:50:06.287]And so again, we started exploring
[00:50:09.540]with how much diversity and stimuli.
[00:50:15.530]So basically, how many examples should we teach at one time?
[00:50:19.246]And it was really our findings so far
[00:50:21.120]then that's pretty mixed amongst children.
[00:50:23.480]Kids that have the fewest reading skills
[00:50:27.810]and spoken communication skills seem to struggle the most
[00:50:31.340]which is not surprising since communication
[00:50:33.340]just another typography,
[00:50:34.690]writing is another positive communication.
[00:50:37.297]But all the participants in our studies
[00:50:40.110]have been able to acquire the skills,
[00:50:41.440]just some take a little bit longer than the others.
[00:50:44.960]So recently I just of want to share
[00:50:46.180]with this is just the same logic
[00:50:47.540]as we developed with proto-attainment.
[00:50:50.720]And it's not out for development,
[00:50:52.490]we just developed it and test it.
[00:50:53.323]I think, in the next year or so,
[00:50:55.040]they're going to be looking at it.
[00:50:55.873]And this is not a plug.
[00:50:57.160]I'm not sure when it'll ever come out,
[00:50:58.540]we kind of did the same thing.
[00:50:59.660]So we developed a software program
[00:51:02.460]where we had the little students avatar on the right end
[00:51:04.700]that it would provide the same type of model.
[00:51:06.530]So we had a word bank,
[00:51:07.840]it would say they would put the software, present a picture
[00:51:10.730]and say, write a sentence about the picture.
[00:51:12.740]And it would do the response prompting for them.
[00:51:14.990]So it highlight the correct selection, right?
[00:51:18.057]And then it would present to them zero second delay trial.
[00:51:22.100]So it would present for them an option, right,
[00:51:24.440]where after they had a couple of times
[00:51:26.390]to practice before prompts, then it would say,
[00:51:28.150]write a sentence about the picture and wait.
[00:51:30.610]And students didn't respond between, I think, we set
[00:51:33.360]at eight seconds, then it would make the selection for them,
[00:51:36.790]give them the prompt.
[00:51:40.430]Interestingly, we tried this with kids
[00:51:43.000]with mild disabilities but intense kind of real weaknesses
[00:51:48.300]and written expression and write in sentences.
[00:51:50.880]And here are some of the results of those.
[00:51:55.750]So at the beginning, right, this was her sentences.
[00:52:00.440]And then afterwards, after a couple,
[00:52:03.030]maybe a week or so of dosage, we started seeing it shape up.
[00:52:13.010]And we started seeing them increase the complexity
[00:52:14.890]of sentences as the software got a little more complex.
[00:52:18.190]There's a little kindergartener, at first write duck,
[00:52:21.850]write a sentence about the duck.
[00:52:23.410]And he wrote B
[00:52:25.460]which was probably a D for him reversed, right?
[00:52:27.940]Puppy and tree.
[00:52:28.773]And by the end of it, he was writing in spool sentences.
[00:52:31.860]So pretty cool stuff seeing this applied to this population.
[00:52:36.950]There's some publications related to those
[00:52:38.420]that you can kind of check out if you're interested.
[00:52:42.159]All right, so a couple of things I also want to share is
[00:52:46.230]though there's been only one application
[00:52:48.030]to folks with autism, we haven't seen it applied
[00:52:52.240]at least to my knowledge, applied to students
[00:52:54.460]with more severe intellectual disabilities
[00:52:56.290]but it's using sentence combining to develop,
[00:53:00.890]to increase the complexity of students' sentences.
[00:53:02.747]I just think it's a great opportunity.
[00:53:04.700]We had some students in my lab
[00:53:06.610]that I would run every summer, try this out
[00:53:09.800]with some of the students with severe disabilities.
[00:53:11.860]And some of them were very responsive to it.
[00:53:15.310]So it's just another strategy that's out there.
[00:53:17.530]So Bruce Saddler has a great text called
[00:53:19.457]"Teacher Guide to Effective Sentence Writing."
[00:53:22.390]So the idea is that we're teaching students
[00:53:25.240]to manipulate words when planning for sentences.
[00:53:27.560]So example, we will have the tasks look like this.
[00:53:30.830]The dog is brown, the dog barks
[00:53:32.700]and we teach them the right, the brown dog barks.
[00:53:35.810]So the idea is we are engaged these activities.
[00:53:39.010]We're really measuring increases in the quality
[00:53:43.380]and length of their sentences outside of these activities.
[00:53:46.760]So these activities are intended to teach kids to manipulate
[00:53:50.480]and words and increase the complexity of their responses.
[00:53:54.840]The study for kids with autism that's available,
[00:53:58.020]it was queued.
[00:53:59.090]So what that means as there was some sort of,
[00:54:01.330]so in this example, there was a queued exercise.
[00:54:05.440]So there was something that told them where the word was
[00:54:08.440]at first that they should focus on and insert
[00:54:10.540]into another word or insert into the other sentence.
[00:54:13.250]So the dog barks, the dog is brown, the brown dog barks.
[00:54:18.670]You can do it in parenthesis, the dog barks, he is hungry.
[00:54:21.940]And other example, the dog barks because he is hungry.
[00:54:26.550]So another great set of strategies, if you haven't looked
[00:54:28.690]into sentence combining, again, check it out.
[00:54:31.270]It's another potential way to increases
[00:54:34.405]the complexity of sentences with our students.
[00:54:38.060]Again, I'd share this, even though there's only one study
[00:54:40.860]with kids with autism,
[00:54:41.693]I think it's something that could be really compelling
[00:54:43.830]and easily applied.
[00:54:44.810]You could try out with your population
[00:54:46.493]and the students you're working with.
[00:54:49.080]So I'm gonna just give you a couple more examples
[00:54:50.820]of how we've kind of applied this structure
[00:54:52.580]with systematic instruction.
[00:54:54.576]I want to make sure I don't go over my time today.
[00:54:58.710]So early as a doc student, I conducted a series
[00:55:01.790]of studies that the first one was kind of dumb.
[00:55:04.930]I tell people that, it was like a party trick,
[00:55:07.400]but then it got a little bit more.
[00:55:09.060]But throughout the iterations of the studies,
[00:55:12.140]we learned a lot more about what students could do
[00:55:15.940]giving predictable writing routines
[00:55:18.080]and good systematic instruction.
[00:55:20.550]So essentially, the studies involved this,
[00:55:22.220]we use PixWriter, which is a piece of software
[00:55:24.840]that I liked at the time.
[00:55:25.673]It was almost dummy proof.
[00:55:26.980]All you had to do is you type in the words,
[00:55:29.150]it automatically populates it
[00:55:30.440]into a word array, just down here,
[00:55:32.430]there's a keyboard function or kind of a display at the top.
[00:55:35.770]Students would select words
[00:55:37.110]and then it would write for them.
[00:55:40.900]We used what was called simultaneous prompting.
[00:55:42.980]So I'm just going to talk you through the procedure here.
[00:55:46.070]So every day, so we did a preference assessments
[00:55:48.620]and figured out what kids might want to write about.
[00:55:50.350]For kids that weren't strong in terms of speaking,
[00:55:53.220]most of our kids weren't we basically gave them
[00:55:54.900]the sets of pictures and we just said,
[00:55:58.160]what do you want to write about?
[00:55:59.937]And so kids would select it, select pictures
[00:56:03.480]and then we would kind of go,
[00:56:05.550]then we would present the red again
[00:56:07.695]with that picture missing, right?
[00:56:09.540]So if there were six pictures
[00:56:10.680]and went down to five, present again four, three,
[00:56:14.370]if they didn't select any more, we pulled them off.
[00:56:16.280]And we did that three times.
[00:56:17.320]So the kids that we basically used pictures,
[00:56:20.300]we wrote around topics
[00:56:21.460]to which the kids kept selecting pictures, right?
[00:56:23.593]That they seem the most interested in.
[00:56:26.800]Some were strange, some were Yoda
[00:56:29.840]and some were one kid, for some,
[00:56:32.440]we had to put some special things
[00:56:34.210]in that he was really into a hairdryer.
[00:56:35.870]So we wrote a little story about a hairdryer
[00:56:39.110]but so after we did the preference assessment,
[00:56:41.239]we designed templates and we said, all right,
[00:56:43.583]this we designed simple stories that had mixed parts
[00:56:48.660]for each of those stories.
[00:56:49.710]So each day we would say, we present the picture
[00:56:52.690]and say, write a story about the,
[00:56:56.240]and we would show the picture and name it.
[00:56:59.030]We would take data based on how they responded.
[00:57:02.220]As soon as they were finished, right?
[00:57:05.100]We did simultaneous prompting.
[00:57:06.960]So essentially we say, let's write one together.
[00:57:09.760]And I would prompt the student to write robot went
[00:57:15.270]to space and students would make selections.
[00:57:18.380]And again, the software's providing auditory feedback
[00:57:20.930]which is great.
[00:57:23.106]And then at the end, we would play all the story back
[00:57:25.890]and we'd be like, yay, get a little positive feedback.
[00:57:29.700]We would do that two to three times
[00:57:31.930]depending on the study, right?
[00:57:33.434]And then we'd stop.
[00:57:35.600]The next day, we would go back and probe again,
[00:57:37.700]see what they'd learned from the day before.
[00:57:41.720]So again, here's your description of it.
[00:57:43.470]You can see the old Mac computer there.
[00:57:49.620]Essentially, what we found through this work was that
[00:57:53.020]so we did it across, excuse me, 10 kids,
[00:57:57.560]10 total kids, three different studies.
[00:58:00.050]And in each time, kids were able to acquire
[00:58:03.390]the simple sentence structures.
[00:58:05.550]So pretty great.
[00:58:06.450]What was also really interesting about this
[00:58:08.300]is that students were kids that had handwriting skills
[00:58:12.010]and we'd give them a piece of paper and say, write about it.
[00:58:15.100]Then they would, boom.
[00:58:16.050]They jumped right in there
[00:58:16.980]and they would be able to write it.
[00:58:18.050]Some kids that had vocal language
[00:58:19.670]would tell us a story, tell us a story about the King.
[00:58:22.289]And then they would tell us the story.
[00:58:23.650]So again, we solve some transfer of the skills
[00:58:26.490]across typography which was pretty exciting for us.
[00:58:31.020]Couple of years later after that,
[00:58:33.270]we were kinda messing around
[00:58:35.240]and we wanted to try something a little bit different
[00:58:39.470]that looked a little bit more
[00:58:40.610]like some of the planning that happens
[00:58:42.140]in our general education classrooms.
[00:58:45.740]So we didn't publish this study
[00:58:47.210]'cause we lost a participant
[00:58:49.600]but I think the procedures are interesting.
[00:58:51.660]So this was in a school for kids
[00:58:53.240]with severe behavioral problems.
[00:58:57.410]And so essentially, it would look like this.
[00:58:59.440]We would sit down with the student and we'd say,
[00:59:01.360]today, we're gonna work on writing a story.
[00:59:02.905]What do you want to write about, right?
[00:59:04.240]And then we said, okay, first we need a character.
[00:59:06.880]And so we had a white board with a template.
[00:59:08.750]Blank was at the blank.
[00:59:10.610]We let the part in the middle
[00:59:11.650]in case a student wanted to tell something more complex
[00:59:13.890]about it because these students had vocal language.
[00:59:16.830]And then at the bottom we had a sentence, blank fell blank.
[00:59:19.300]And we were kind of going off those story elements
[00:59:22.450]like a character is introduced
[00:59:24.250]into a setting and there's an action,
[00:59:27.760]potentially, a second action, some statement of emotion.
[00:59:31.110]And so we would say, first, we need a character.
[00:59:33.320]Who do you want to write about?
[00:59:34.320]If they couldn't tell us, then we had a binder here
[00:59:37.140]with different subjects, different settings.
[00:59:40.140]And so at each one, each question they couldn't answer.
[00:59:43.180]We'd say, how about one of these?
[00:59:45.160]If they didn't select, we would pick one for them.
[00:59:47.980]And I love sharing this.
[00:59:49.247]If you can kind of look at the time, this is back in 2011.
[00:59:54.300]So at the beginning, we asked him to write,
[00:59:55.670]we were consistently getting questions, which was great.
[00:59:58.510]He understood demand function of writing
[01:00:00.110]or the request function of writing.
[01:00:02.350]After several weeks of intervention,
[01:00:04.300]we started getting more complex responses.
[01:00:06.120]And this is when Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant
[01:00:08.520]is at the same ball camp.
[01:00:10.560]And they are in the stadium.
[01:00:11.760]They are happy.
[01:00:12.690]So we saw a nice, systematic kind of increase
[01:00:16.460]in the complexity of his writing responses.
[01:00:19.550]A couple of years after that, we decided
[01:00:21.090]that we were looking at another way of applying this
[01:00:26.179]same logics with three middle school students
[01:00:29.670]with moderate, severe disabilities, some with autism,
[01:00:31.590]some with just intellectual disability,
[01:00:33.970]not just but we had intellectual disability.
[01:00:36.100]And the focus was on story grammar.
[01:00:37.760]So they already could write sentences.
[01:00:39.250]There was oftentimes it wasn't a lot of cohesion.
[01:00:41.440]So if you gave a picture, they just write, the ball is red.
[01:00:44.070]The ball is bouncing.
[01:00:45.060]The boy has the ball.
[01:00:46.450]Not really as in a story format.
[01:00:49.900]We wanted them to include a character,
[01:00:52.230]a setting, two related events and some characters emotions.
[01:00:56.120]So the procedures look a little bit like this.
[01:00:59.330]We present a Pixar video clip, right?
[01:01:03.180]And then what we would do is we would say, all right,
[01:01:05.620]we want to make sure that we have all these story elements.
[01:01:09.050]And so together, we would write a story together.
[01:01:11.870]So we'd watch the video clip.
[01:01:14.400]We would say, okay, who is the character?
[01:01:16.480]And they would say, oh, it was this bunny monster bunny
[01:01:19.410]or I forgot what it was, one of them was a monster,
[01:01:21.480]but one was called "Ormie the Pig."
[01:01:23.510]And once there was a pig and he lived in, where did he live?
[01:01:27.100]And so we would work together, the student to complete that.
[01:01:30.400]We'd read it aloud at the end.
[01:01:32.220]And then we'd ask the students say, okay,
[01:01:33.760]now you write your own story.
[01:01:37.270]And we'd also at the end of that as they wrote their story,
[01:01:40.130]we'd sit down with them and we would assess
[01:01:44.630]if they had the five elements, right?
[01:01:46.560]And then we would have them self-evaluate,
[01:01:49.140]kind of self-graph their number of elements.
[01:01:51.240]And this is a really exciting part for them.
[01:01:53.750]So one of our guys, so all of our folks, again,
[01:01:55.790]this was published in Education and Training
[01:01:57.830]in Autism and Developmental Disabilities.
[01:01:59.230]We saw gains across all the participants
[01:02:01.936]and all of our folks were able to include
[01:02:03.900]all the five story elements.
[01:02:05.850]And this is one of our guys.
[01:02:06.683]So at first we asked him to write, if I grow up,
[01:02:09.230]I want to be an artist, which is kind of sad
[01:02:11.080]like if he wants to grow up.
[01:02:12.410]But I think, so if I grow up, I want to be an artists,
[01:02:16.440]I went to Dollywood, I rode rides at Dollywood.
[01:02:19.300]I walked around the shops and then it got to,
[01:02:22.440]I was playing games in my room.
[01:02:25.400]I was playing Assassin in my room.
[01:02:27.280]My mom told me to fold towels, but I did not listen.
[01:02:30.100]I got grounded because I did not listen to my mom.
[01:02:32.220]I felt sad.
[01:02:33.550]So you see, in each of those, he started incorporating
[01:02:35.950]some of those template components in there
[01:02:37.930]which was pretty cool.
[01:02:40.190]All right, so I just want to talk about
[01:02:42.330]a couple other quick narratives
[01:02:43.890]and then we've got about eight more minutes
[01:02:46.530]and then we'll have some time for questions.
[01:02:50.710]So again, think about, as you're thinking about
[01:02:55.620]some of these research studies that we're addressing
[01:02:57.520]and thinking about building,
[01:02:59.010]you've got these predictable routines, building instruction
[01:03:01.560]around recorded life event.
[01:03:03.090]So we showed videos and these,
[01:03:04.870]we show kind of arbitrary pictures
[01:03:06.490]but you could also write around video clips.
[01:03:08.940]You'd take on your phone, have them engage in real life,
[01:03:11.510]the activities writing around kind of movie versions
[01:03:15.180]of books that are presented
[01:03:16.250]in general education classrooms
[01:03:17.900]or giving kids the opportunity to kind of select
[01:03:21.240]their own target around which to generate a story.
[01:03:23.870]So in your own practice.
[01:03:25.690]So one of the things that's really important
[01:03:26.850]that we realized that we started moving
[01:03:28.140]towards now and we're planning another study.
[01:03:30.070]Now we got some things kind of kicked out
[01:03:31.510]because of COVID some research in schools
[01:03:35.140]but we're starting to think about
[01:03:36.950]kids need to write in response to texts.
[01:03:39.390]One of my colleagues, Pam Mims,
[01:03:42.600]has done some work with attainment
[01:03:44.490]where they've developed some software programs
[01:03:46.540]where kids are able to construct simple passages about
[01:03:49.800]written texts by selecting whole sentences in order.
[01:03:52.730]And I'll show you that in a minute
[01:03:53.990]but based on some of that work, we conducted a study
[01:03:57.199]in a school where kids were given a choice of a text.
[01:04:00.730]So basically, we took kids responses, excuse me,
[01:04:03.810]we assess kids on kind of where they are
[01:04:05.680]we're on reading level.
[01:04:06.840]We developed some of these little boats
[01:04:08.150]maybe from reading A to Z.
[01:04:09.350]We match them across words.
[01:04:11.490]Essentially, what we do is let them pick a text.
[01:04:14.330]Then we'd say, read the text
[01:04:16.900]and write an opinion about what you read.
[01:04:19.344]And we used constant time delay procedure.
[01:04:22.920]And again, we had them select different stories each day.
[01:04:29.120]So if the kids liked this story more than two days in a row,
[01:04:31.900]then we removed that from the mix and insert another one.
[01:04:35.040]So essentially, it looked a lot like this
[01:04:36.473]that we gave them a word bank.
[01:04:39.797]Let me show you, that look like this, right?
[01:04:42.850]And we would just say, have them write a simple brain.
[01:04:45.920]I read about the blank, I liked or disliked the story.
[01:04:50.340]So once they learned the structure, really,
[01:04:51.780]there was only one degree of freedom, what they read about
[01:04:55.427]and actually two degrees of freedom,
[01:04:56.810]what they read about then identify that now,
[01:04:59.260]and then whether they select liked or disliked
[01:05:02.830]when re writing the story.
[01:05:04.500]To make sure it corresponded
[01:05:06.370]after they finished story, did you like or dislike it?
[01:05:08.710]And we made sure that a correct response
[01:05:11.860]also matched disliked or so it corresponded
[01:05:15.230]to what they had said to us.
[01:05:16.800]Of course, they could have changed their mind
[01:05:18.060]but that's the best way that we can assess that.
[01:05:21.430]So we taught as a chain task.
[01:05:23.960]So during the first couple of days, we would say
[01:05:26.880]they read the story and say, let's help you.
[01:05:28.840]So we would present an opportunity to say, write up.
[01:05:31.533]So we did two days, zero second delay trials.
[01:05:35.400]We would prompt them through, point to I read
[01:05:39.710]and they would make the selections.
[01:05:40.543]They would read it back, yay, reinforced them.
[01:05:43.960]And then we start our prompt delay trials.
[01:05:47.140]So I think it was on day three.
[01:05:49.330]We'd say, write your opinion about the story.
[01:05:54.300]I, if they made an error, we correct that error.
[01:05:57.680]And then we would deliver a prompt.
[01:06:00.490]And then we wait five seconds.
[01:06:01.790]We say, keep writing and wait five seconds
[01:06:03.330]from the right, the next word.
[01:06:04.163]So we kind of taught it like a chain task
[01:06:06.860]and all the students were able
[01:06:08.630]to acquire the simple, the story.
[01:06:12.860]So again, I want to show you just take a second
[01:06:14.560]to also show you Dr. Mim's work.
[01:06:18.300]So Pam is at ETSU and they developed the software.
[01:06:23.640]And if you take a look at it,
[01:06:25.120]it's within the attainment reading program
[01:06:29.900]they were able to...
[01:06:31.420]So they read a story about holes.
[01:06:36.252]And then at the end they would say, an opinion
[01:06:38.100]is what you think or believe.
[01:06:39.230]What is your story about?
[01:06:40.300]And they would make a selection, right?
[01:06:43.940]And then together at the end of it,
[01:06:46.840]it would take all their selection
[01:06:48.310]and create a little passage.
[01:06:52.330]So one more thing that I'd like to share with you actually
[01:06:56.260]is actually, I'm gonna show you two more
[01:06:59.660]and I think we're going to be good with our time,
[01:07:01.570]two more studies.
[01:07:02.670]So another thing that was done recently by Angel Lee
[01:07:06.420]and colleagues, it wasn't recently, but it was in 2016.
[01:07:11.150]So they were working with students
[01:07:12.730]with mild intellectual disabilities.
[01:07:14.837]And I thought this was interesting
[01:07:16.070]because it's still kind of adheres
[01:07:17.200]to that pattern set up, right?
[01:07:19.520]So two individuals with intellectual disabilities,
[01:07:22.660]they taught students have to read in a passage, right?
[01:07:25.650]To transfer information from that passage
[01:07:28.610]to a graphic organizer, and then to a template.
[01:07:32.990]So these are the actual ones in the study.
[01:07:35.620]But if you take a look at it,
[01:07:38.580]I've kind of blown these up for you.
[01:07:39.900]So essentially, they would read and say, okay,
[01:07:42.920]what was the topic, right?
[01:07:44.150]And so they would use some prompting procedures
[01:07:46.850]student didn't know, they would go back, look in the text.
[01:07:49.130]And so they completed this first
[01:07:51.340]and then they would transfer that to a template, right?
[01:07:55.460]In this essay, I will tell about this topic.
[01:07:58.870]I think it was about soccer, right?
[01:08:00.840]My purpose is to, and they would fill that in.
[01:08:03.290]So they put a lot of supports in there.
[01:08:05.890]And students were able to transfer this information
[01:08:09.110]into this template effectively.
[01:08:11.690]Now what they didn't do
[01:08:12.540]but I think is plausible and could be done
[01:08:15.580]is that over time, we gradually fade out the supports
[01:08:18.320]in this template where students
[01:08:19.460]are now independently transferring their,
[01:08:23.840]generating their own sentences after having this model.
[01:08:28.390]So the final thing I want to share with you
[01:08:30.060]is a couple of years after this
[01:08:33.240]at some of these first studies,
[01:08:34.690]I had a great young teacher who is working
[01:08:36.980]at transition program interested in writing.
[01:08:40.320]So she said, "I'd like to do this with some of my students."
[01:08:42.420]And so we talked about writing
[01:08:43.557]and I was like, well, we've done story writing.
[01:08:47.030]Do you have all your students?
[01:08:48.346]Do they want to be authors?
[01:08:49.550]What is meaningful writing to them right now?
[01:08:51.060]She says, "Well, they're working on resume cover letters."
[01:08:54.340]So essentially what we did is we said,
[01:08:56.340]okay, here's what we'll do.
[01:08:58.990]We'll figure out a template to teach
[01:09:00.930]for a cover letter writing.
[01:09:02.510]So we got into the Googles, right?
[01:09:05.850]We developed, we looked at several samples is say, okay,
[01:09:08.310]what would be a minimum cover letter
[01:09:12.880]that would get a point across?
[01:09:14.690]It was kind of a greeting, statement of job of interest,
[01:09:17.490]a reason why they would be good for the job,
[01:09:19.780]thanking the employer or salutation.
[01:09:23.310]So we basically taught them to construct that template.
[01:09:25.970]So during the first day of instruction,
[01:09:27.540]we reviewed a cover letter and its components.
[01:09:30.150]And then we say, we want you to write one for us, right?
[01:09:32.760]And so we would have them write
[01:09:35.730]and then we would have them revise their probes.
[01:09:38.200]So basically what we do is we went, we had a list
[01:09:40.520]of all the important components that we said, okay,
[01:09:42.190]do you have a greeting?
[01:09:43.590]If they would say yes, we were like, nice.
[01:09:46.330]If they did, we'd say, can you put one in?
[01:09:49.540]You forgot it.
[01:09:50.470]If they couldn't do that,
[01:09:51.303]then we had, again, a binder, a little notebook
[01:09:53.810]that had options for them and they would look
[01:09:57.090]and they would choose one of the options to insert.
[01:10:00.790]We did.
[01:10:02.280]We also had the students every day graph the number
[01:10:05.650]of components that the cover letter components
[01:10:09.670]in their products.
[01:10:14.040]So again, sorry, I just talked through it for you
[01:10:17.250]but yes, that, and that was a really important component.
[01:10:19.680]So across several of our, about three of our studies now,
[01:10:22.040]we've included self-graphing.
[01:10:23.400]So I had students graph their components
[01:10:25.220]and it seemed to be a really important component
[01:10:28.200]of the writing process, kind of here at the data.
[01:10:31.360]They got it pretty quickly.
[01:10:32.700]What's really nice about this
[01:10:33.970]is after we taught them to write up for those jobs,
[01:10:36.890]we presented another job.
[01:10:38.210]So we actually, they were engaged in transition work.
[01:10:40.470]So when we selected targets to write,
[01:10:42.410]we actually selected jobs they indicated interest them.
[01:10:46.560]But we also asked them after the study to write about jobs
[01:10:49.330]that they had indicated that that were second on their list,
[01:10:52.780]no training, they were able to construct
[01:10:55.710]pretty solid cover letters of the second job.
[01:11:00.870]So again, a couple of things to think about
[01:11:03.940]everything that I've showed you today,
[01:11:05.720]you could probably do it in small group arrangement.
[01:11:08.950]So most of our studies were done
[01:11:10.320]in kind of one-on-one setups,
[01:11:12.260]but it's really easy for you to have a small group present
[01:11:15.510]a model to everyone, provide feedback.
[01:11:18.620]So in your classroom, this might be a nice way
[01:11:20.910]to engage multiple students in that writing instruction.
[01:11:26.550]For this example that we talked about,
[01:11:28.430]they can work with peers.
[01:11:30.750]So at this university, other kids were looking for jobs.
[01:11:33.880]So it would have been completely appropriate to have peers
[01:11:36.410]and our students work together on their cover letters.
[01:11:39.840]And then we can add them actually connected
[01:11:41.860]to a mock interview process.
[01:11:43.420]So we can extend that they write their letters, they go in.
[01:11:45.610]And so they're in the full range of employment.
[01:11:50.210]So I send it to an interviewer.
[01:11:52.120]We have a mock job interview where they're reviewing the,
[01:11:54.250]asking them about the letter,
[01:11:55.810]and again, have this kind of stronger connection
[01:11:57.670]to the purpose of writing.
[01:12:01.800]And if you have any additional resources,
[01:12:04.390]so that's all that I have for you today.
[01:12:05.510]Sorry I tried to squeeze in a lot in 65 minutes.
[01:12:08.770]I'm notorious for never shedding up
[01:12:10.487]but I did have a few minutes here for questions.
[01:12:14.150]Here's some additional resources.
[01:12:15.420]So we've written a couple of chapters.
[01:12:18.490]The year before last, we put out a nice kind of overview
[01:12:20.830]of the research and strategies for teaching kids
[01:12:22.960]with writing and topics and language disorders.
[01:12:25.700]There's some great chapters that I've written in.
[01:12:28.340]They're not great, (laughs) but they are great books.
[01:12:32.960]No, but they have a lot of information in them.
[01:12:35.220]And like for instance, Diane Browder
[01:12:37.330]and Fred Spooner's recent methods book
[01:12:40.020]for students with severe disabilities.
[01:12:42.200]Also, you can reach out to me on robert.pennington@uncc.edu.
[01:12:46.960]And I would love to talk to you, tell me what you're using.
[01:12:50.290]Let's brainstorm some ideas.
[01:12:52.280]We also have a great PhD program,
[01:12:53.780]so come out and study it with me.
[01:12:56.090]All right, with that being said, I am finished.
[01:13:00.850]Thank you for coming today.
[01:13:02.260]Bye-bye.

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Written Expression and Autism

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